If necessity is the mother of invention, misfortune is the
mother of literature. When Nathaniel Hawthorne was ejected from
the Custom-House at Salem he went home in a despondent frame of
mind, only to be greeted by his wonderful wife's pertinent
remark, "Now you can write your book." He responded to this
stimulus by writing the best book ever written in the Western
Hemisphere, "The Scarlet Letter." We learn from a famous chapter
in "Roughing It" that if Samuel Clemens had not gone to help a
sick friend, or if his partner had received the note he left for
him before starting on this charitable expedition, Samuel L.
Clemens would have been a millionaire. This episode has since his
death been printed in a list of the misfortunes that marked his
romantic and tragic career. But if at that time Mr. Clemens had
become a millionaire, and he missed it by the narrowest possible
margin, he never would have become Mark Twain. He struggled
against his destiny with all the physical and mental force he
possessed. He tried to make a living by every means except
literature, and nothing but steady misfortune and dire necessity
made him walk in the foreordained path. Mark Twain always
regarded himself as the plaything of chance; professing no belief
in God, he never thanked Him for his amazing successes, nor
rebelled against Him for his sufferings. But is ever there was a
man whose times were in His hand, that man was Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was a greater artist than he was humorist; a
greater humorist than he was philosopher; a greater philosopher
than he was thinker. Goethe's well-known remark about Byron, "The
moment he thinks, he is a child," would in some respects be
applicable to Mark Twain. The least valuable part of his work is
found among his efforts to rewrite history, his critical essays
on men and on institutions, and his contributions to
introspective thought. His long book on Joan of Arc is valuable
only for its style; his short book on the Shakespeare-Bacon
controversy shows appalling ignorance; his defense of Harriet
Shelley is praiseworthy only in its chivalry; his attack on
Fenimore Cooper is of no consequence except as a humorous
document; his labored volume on Christian Science has little
significance; and when his posthumous essay on the "Meaning of
Life" is published, as I am afraid it will be before long, it
will surprise and depress more readers than it will convince.

As a philosopher, Mark Twain was a pessimist as to the value
of the individual life and an optimist concerning human progress.
He agreed with Schopenhauer that non-existence was preferable to
existence; that sorrow was out of all proportion to happiness. On
the other hand, he had absolutely nothing of Carlyle's peculiar
pessimism, who regarded the human soul as something noble and
divine, but insisted that modern progress was entirely in the
wrong direction, and that things in general were steadily growing
worse. Carlyle believed in God and man, but he hated democracy as
a political principle; Mark Twain apparently believed in neither
God nor man, but his faith in democracy was so great that he
almost made a religion out of it. He was never tired of exposing
the tyranny of superstition and of unmasking the romantic
splendor of medieval life.

Mark Twain was one of the foremost humorists of modern times;
and there are not wanting good critics who already dare to place
him with Rabelais, Cervantes, and Moliere. Others would regard
such an estimate as mere hyperbole, born of transient enthusiasm.
But we all know now that he was more than a funmaker; we know
that his humor, while purely American, had the note of
universality. He tested historical institutions, the social life
of past ages, political and religious creeds, and the future
abode of saints by the practical touchstone of humor. Nothing
sharpens the eyes of a traveler more than a sense of humor;
nothing enables him better to make the subsequent story of his
journey pictorially impressive. "The Innocents Abroad" is a great
book, because it represents the wonders of Europe as seen by an
unawed Philistine with no background; he has his limitations, but
at any rate his opinions of things are formed after he
sees them, and not before. He looks with his own eyes, not
through the colored spectacles of convention. "Roughing It" is
still a greater book, because in the writing of that no
background was necessary, no limitations are felt; we know that
his testimony is true. The humor of Mark Twain is American in its
point of view, in its love of the incongruous, in its fondness
for colossal exaggeration; but it is universal in that it deals
not with passing phenomena, or with matters of temporary
interest, but with essential and permanent aspects of human
nature.

As an artist Mark Twain already seems great. The funniest man
in the world, he was at the same time a profoundly serious
artist, a faithful servant of his literary ideals. The
environment, the characterization, and the humanity in "Tom
Sawyer" remind us of the great novelists, whose characters remain
in our memory as sharply defined individuals simply because they
have the touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. In other
words, "Tom Sawyer" resembles the masterpieces of fiction in
being intensely local and at the same time universal. Tom Sawyer
is a definite personality, but he is also eternal boyhood. In
"Huckleberry Finn" we have three characters who are so different
that they live in different worlds, and really speak different
languages, Tom, Huck, and Jim; we have an amazingly clear
presentation of life in the days of slavery; we have a marvelous
moving picture of the Father of Waters; but, above all, we have a
vital drama of humanity, in its nobility and baseness, its
strength and weakness, its love of truth and its love of fraud,
its utter pathos and its side-splitting mirth. Like nearly all
faithful pictures of the world, it is a vast tragi-comedy. What
does it matter if our great American had his limitations and his
excrescences? To borrow his own phrase, "There is that about the
sun that makes us forget its spots."